


Lightly Row

by Wenzel



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, M/M, and alien musical instruments and Space Diplomacy, big fluff, just..... fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 06:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12978123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wenzel/pseuds/Wenzel
Summary: Aliens want the Paladins to play instruments as part of their welcome. Problem is, Keith doesn't know how to play anything. Thankfully, Shiro is there to help.





	Lightly Row

There were a dozen instruments arranged over two tables. Some were familiar, in a passing sense. A xylophone looked like a xylophone, after all. But others were strange, like curling flutes with bell-bottom ends. Some had three reeds attached along their sides and two sets of fingerholes. One was a simple drum, even if it was large enough to require two of the aliens to lift. Keith stared at two of the horns, crafted from bone and something brass, and wondered what the hell they’d done to deserve the fate they’d been given.

“They want each of us to play in their ceremony,” Allura had told them. She looked as uneasy as Keith felt at the news. “It seems foreigners are meant to be accepted only when they’ve become part of the whole.” She paused. “At least, that’s what I gathered from the Castle’s translation software. They speak in odd whistles and shifting colours on their skin.”

Lance had grinned. “I get the guitar!”

“Do they even have one of those?” Hunk had asked. That’d broken Lance’s smile like a hammer against glass. Lance knew how to play the guitar, Pidge had spent a month playing the trumpet before she got kicked out of band for sneaking in computer time, Allura could play the Altean harp, and Keith… had nothing. It’d never been in the school budgets of the places he’d attended, and by the time he’d been anywhere he could have played, he was too old to start, according to the curriculum.

Shiro, at least, could play the piano. Hunk had claimed all the drums--any drum, he said, would do, but the drums were his. But in front of the strange instruments, nobody seemed to know what to do. At least until Lance leapt forward and dove for a guitarish instrument. It may have been crafted from shells and strung with whiskers from a sea mammal, but Lance declared that only made it more of a fit.

“I didn’t spend all of high school learning the guitar to charm the ladies,” he said, “only to be scared off because of a bit of fish smell.” He twanged a string. It warbled a note, sounding nothing like a guitar. His grin turned strained. 

Hunk swiped the large leathery drum. He took a few experimental whacks, and a low, smooth thump echoed in the room. Relief spread over his face. It was  _ normal _ . It was, at heart, doable. Pidge was less lucky.

She took an oboe-like instrument, only to lift it and find the bottom flared like a horn. The Gilga trilled and burbled in happiness. An experimental toot produced a hideous squawk. Pidge jumped at the sound, but the Gilga were still pleased, so she couldn’t put it back. 

Allura’s eye for instruments was similar to Hunk’s. Her harp had been made from catgut and bone, and while the components seemed to unnerve her, she translated her Altean harp skills beautifully. Shiro leaned in and whispered to her, and she pointed at a long xylophone tool. It turned out it was simply a keyboard made with--and everyone cringed at the revelation, including Shiro-- _ teeth _ . The ends had been filed down to prevent maiming, but that’s what it was. Teeth.

When the misery of the revelation wore off, everyone turned to Keith. “You’ve played the trumpet, haven’t you?” Lance asked.

Pidge scoffed. “He’s not a trumpet player!”

“Yeah,” Hunk said. “He’s more of a cellist.”

Pidge shook her head. “I vote percussion.”

“What about violin?” Shiro said. Shiro eyed Keith’s hands. “He’s got the skills to learn, if he doesn’t know.”

Keith frowned as his lips pinched. “... I’m not sure that’s a good idea--”

“He’s got elegant fingers,” Allura agreed. She left her harp in favour of surveying the table. “The Gilga must have some type of string instrument. Something that’s played quickly yet with skill.”

Lance mirrored Keith’s frown. “Give him a triangle. That’s probably all he can play.” Silently, Keith agreed. “And elegant fingers? What are they doing, the waltz?”

Allura didn’t look at Lance as she spoke. “Then I won’t compliment your fingers either.” She prodded at a flute and edged it away from the pile. Shiro joined her in the search. Keith weighed his options in asking for the triangle. He’d be less likely to fuck things up with it, but then it’d mean conceding to Lance’s barb. Did he want that? Could he endure Lance’s smug smile?

He tried to compromise. “Someone’s going to have to teach me how to play. Does anyone know how to use a violin?”

Silence, as nobody sprung to offer help. It was Shiro who came through for him. “I can teach you the basics, and the Gilga can fill you in on the rest. I think that’d work best.”

When did Shiro suddenly know anything about violins? Keith kept the question to himself as he was handed an instrument bigger than a violin but still carriable. It’d been carved from shells and strung with a sea mammal’s whiskers, like Lance’s guitar. The bow was a piece off coral. He grimaced at the feeling of bubbly coral against his fingers. It felt like it was diseased, not charming. Shiro caught the expression and smiled despite it.

The Gilga were thrilled at all their choices. What followed were swift instructions to prepare compositions of their own and share them with the Gilga; Allura told them, when they were out of earshot from the Gilga, that they could use Altean melodies and modify them. “It’s hardly like they’ll recognize it,” she said, “and I think it’ll be simple enough for everyone instead of improvising.”

Keith wished he’d got the triangle. Even when Shiro came to him that night, he wished he’d spoken up in favour of the triangle. “Did you ever take music?” Shiro asked, oblivious to the undertaking he’d signed on for.

“Never,” Keith said. “I don’t even know how to hold the violin right.”

“Viola,” Shiro corrected absently as he adjusted Keith’s body to the right posture. “It’s a bit too big for a violin. It’s going to make a lower, richer sound than what you’re thinking.”

Shiro’s hands were… distracting. Extremely so. They were warm and large and firm. Never harsh, even when he pressed at Keith’s back and forced him straight. His arm was adjusted to something high and posed, but never stiff. Every time Shiro’s fingers pressed against his skin, heat flushed through the limb and his mind. Keith knew Shiro meant nothing by it, even if they were lovers, but it didn’t stop his breaths from hitching. 

“I don’t know the viola,” Shiro told him. “I had some lessons with the violin before I went back to the piano. If it comes to it, we can get the Gilga to help. We’ve got--” He turned his head to look at a clock. “Twenty vargas to get you playing  _ something _ . Even if it’s Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

Lance would never let him forget playing that. “Something people won’t recognize, if that’s possible.”

Shiro’s eyes glinted. He didn’t comment on what Keith had dubbed the Lance Problem. Instead, he adjusted Keith’s fingers on the bow, and coaxed his wrist into a proper bow stroke. There was no cheerful trill or aching song. All that came out was a skin-chilling saw-screech. Keith flinched at the sound, but Shiro laughed.

“It’s like that for everyone at first.” He tapped his fingers on the inside of Keith’s wrist, lightening Keith’s touch. “I think I know a good song for you, though. It’s simple, but Lance won’t know it, and it always sounds good.” Shiro paused, his brow furrowing. “... Plus it’s one of the few I remember for the violin. I can accompany you on the piano too.”

It was ‘Lightly Row’, which Shiro said Keith could call ‘Hänschen Klein’ if he wanted to hide the origins a bit better. Everything, Keith admitted, sounded better in another language. That earned him a grin from Shiro. The grin didn’t help Keith’s heartbeat, especially when Shiro’s large hand rested against his, fingers twining together as Shiro led him through the finger motions. When Shiro clasped Keith’s fingers and shook them on the strings, Keith was fairly certain his heart stopped.

“We’ll loop it,” Shiro said. “Twice should be enough.” 

Between the instrument being more like a viola than a violin and it being of alien make, the song didn’t sound perfect. It warbled and echoed strangely, becoming like the Gilgas’ bubbly speech. Shiro winced at the higher notes, and Keith privately agreed. The instrument was not what he’d call beautiful.

Worse, many of the movements Shiro remembered from his violin days didn’t translate. And the worst--or best, Keith couldn’t tell--was that it forced Shiro to touch him. Shoulders, hands, fingers, and even Shiro’s breath ghosting over Keith’s cheeks… It was torture and sweetness, all in one. Keith’s cheeks went from pale to grey, and then to a blushy rose. 

He hated it. All of it. He hated that he liked Shiro’s touch, and he hated that Shiro didn’t notice--or pretended not to notice--his thundering pulse and bright flush. Shiro pressed his shoulder, adjusting how Keith held the viola, and it was like being branded. Keith tried not to wheeze.

“You’re doing well,” Shiro told him as he coaxed Keith’s fingers through the notes.

Keith felt a wheeze building in his throat. “... Thanks.” He wanted to throw himself into the Arctic Ocean. Did the Gilga have an equivalent? Or was it all warm water? He tried to distract himself by thinking of a beach day, but then Shiro walked into his brain wearing a skin-suctioned pair of  speedos, and that was the end for that train of thought. 

Shiro hummed along as Keith sawed away. It sounded better coming from Shiro’s mouth than it did from the instrument, but Shiro grinned and clapped when Keith finished. “Now, you just have to do it another hundred times, and you’re good to go.”

Keith forced a small smile that came out crooked. “I think we should probably double that.” He lifted the bow and began to saw again. It creaked and warbled under his touch, and he worried that the strings would break, yet his touch was frustratingly light. What was he doing wrong? Shiro looked just as bemused at the instrument. Still, when Keith looped for the third time, Shiro joined him on the piano.

To say that Shiro knew how to play the piano put it too mildly. Shiro plonked at a few keys, brow furrowed, and within seconds he’d remapped the Gilgan notes to Earth ones. There were a few mistakes--inevitable with his fingers being used to a foreign instrument--but he played with an ease that Keith envied. What mattered, though, was that the tinkling keys hid Keith’s mistakes and filled out the simply melody with flourishes and grand notes. Shiro wasn’t playing Lightly Row, but something far more complex that he wrote on the fly.

Loop ten, and Keith’s shoulder hurt. Muscles pulled in strange directions. The stiff position he held the viola in was worse, though. Shiro had said something about it becoming fluid and natural, but Keith suspected that required far more practice than a single session. Even if the single session was a hundred loops of Lightly Row.

Would he forget it between dinner, sleep, breakfast, and the waiting for their turn in the performance? Keith suspected he’d have to do far more than a simple hundred. Already, his brain was scheduling other practice sessions. The only problem would be avoiding Lance seeing him practice. Keith had no illusions on what he looked like as he played. He felt his brows furrow, the tip of his tongue poke from between his lips, even his hand shaking as he focused on the instrument, desperate for it to make  _ some _ sort of pleasant sound. The Gilgan viola was determined to spite him, though.

By twenty, his shaking hands were frozen by stiffness. Keith grit his teeth, focusing on Shiro’s changing songs and the occasional curse from the man. “This thing plays like I’m beating on shells,” Shiro muttered.

“It’s not too bad, at least.” Keith breathed deep as he began another barrage of sawing. “It’s better than Pidge’s.” That sounded like the unholy wail of a host of ghosts. He launched into loop to twenty two. “What do you think the others are going to do?”

“Allura is doing a piece with Lance--something about a duel. Pidge and Hunk are practicing in the basement, thank God. And then it’s just us two.” Shiro paused on one of the notes, pressing it again and again and frowning. “... I hope the Gilga don’t expect us to do something as a group. It’d be pretty ugly.”

Keith laughed, the sound coming out as a harsh bark. “It’ll already be ugly with me playing.” Shiro looked over, as though about to praise Keith but Keith didn’t meet his gaze. He didn’t need a vigorous episode of praise. He just needed to sound good enough that nobody would ask why he hadn’t played an instrument before, or just make fun of him.

Shiro let them relax into the silence, only broken by Keith’s viola. By loop forty, Shiro leaned over to speak. “You want something to drink?”

“Anything,” Keith said. “Whatever’s closest. I feel like this is the hottest planet I’ve been on that isn’t partly on fire.”

Shiro hummed in agreement and vanished into the halls. Keith knew his viola echoed, so he couldn’t sneak a break. Forty became forty-one, then forty-two, and Shiro appeared with two tall foggy glasses decorated in fruit. His grin stretched across his sculpted face.

“They’re like the Caribbean where it matters,” he said. Shiro placed the glass on a table to Keith’s side. “Hit fifty, and you’re free.”

“Yes, sir,” Keith murmured. Shiro’s golden skin pinked. The next eight loops couldn’t come fast enough. His skill--lacking already--grew worse the closer he got to fifty. Shiro told him to slow down twice and Keith grit his teeth through the last three. When he finished, he grabbed the glass and chugged three gulps. It tasted sweet and tangy--like pineapple, oranges, and caramel. Thick pieces of fruit bumped against his lips, smearing the blue liquid more.

Shiro laughed, though his own glass was half empty. “Breathe, Keith.”

“Not until I get to stop eating goo.” Another few gulps, and he put the glass down. “No offense to Hunk and Coran, but there’s only so much you can do with food goo. This--” He motioned to the wet glass. “This is like heaven. Don’t even tell me what it’s made of. I don’t want to hate it.”

“It’s just a smoothie.”

“Of what?” Keith pressed.

Shiro’s eyes were bright and gleeful. “Who knows? You said you didn’t want to know, Keith.”

Keith stared Shiro down and grabbed the glass again. The first gulp directed the smoothie down his windpipe. He choked, and Shiro burst into laughter, his fingers dancing over the keyboard. “I hate you,” he coughed out.

Shiro leaned over and pressed a single kiss to Keith’s forehead. It left behind an imprint of smoothie. Keith squawked, sending Shiro back into fits of laughter. “You’ve been good today,” Shiro said, “but you still owe me another fifty loops.”

Keith stared at Shiro before he picked up the viola and returned to sawing away at it. His bright blush, he thought, might not be gone in time for the concert.


End file.
